The Buccaneers

by Edith Wharton

  And then glancing out the window, she said briskly: “We’re coming into London. Collect your odds and ends, girls!”

  It was dark when Folyat House loomed high and stately in Portman Square, light shining from its long rows of windows and torches flaming at the grand portal. Footmen jumped down from the barouche which had met the travellers at Paddington, opened its escutcheoned doors, and helped them out. Other footmen led them up steps and into an oval colonnaded lobby. The Glenloe girls’ eyes widened as the groom-of-the-chambers, attended by yet other footmen, conducted them into a great rectangular hall three storeys high which offered the vista of another hall through an arch at the opposite end. The girls were led up a marble-and-wrought-iron staircase which swept up along two sides of the great hall, past embrasures containing marble statues, to a balustraded balcony, its pilastered arches two storeys high, and on to their rooms.

  “I’ve said we’ll dine early,” the Duchess told her guests. “I’ll knock on your doors at seven and we’ll go down together.”

  Dinner was laid on the longest table the Glenloes had ever seen. “Oh, bother,” the Duchess murmured. “I ought to have said the breakfast-room.... We’ll be miles apart.” After biting her lip for a moment, she told the butler: “We shall all sit together at the head, Ogilvy”; and when couverts and candelabra had been moved and she and her friends had taken their places, she indicated a pyramid of ferns and gardenias that mounted two feet high in front of her, saying: “And move that, please, so that we can see each other.”

  Kitty and Cora, seated at the Duchess’s left, opposite Miss Testvalley, watched by the mutes with powdered hair, knee breeches, and silk stockings who stood motionless along the walls, dared not look up from the plates into which other mutes were ladling turtle soup.

  The Duchess turned to Miss Testvalley. “Since this is the prelude to a special occasion, don’t you think Corisande and Catharine might take some wine?”

  Corisande and Catharine, eyeing their governess hopefully, saw a fierce mock-scowl form on her mobile brown face and melt into an infectious smile as she replied: “I certainly do! Especially as Kitty and Cora face several days of festivities when wine will pour like water. But you will be prudent, won’t you, girls? A little water in the wine, do you think, tonight—and at the Binghams’?”

  “Do you know,” the Duchess said to her younger guests, dimpling, “Miss Testvalley let me drink wine for the first time when I was a bridesmaid too. It was at Lady Richard Marable’s wedding, in New York; and something so funny happened just around then. There was a ball—an Assembly ball, rather like the ones in country towns here; only in New York it’s a little like being presented at Court, because there isn’t any Court, and the White House isn’t the same thing; so if you weren’t invited it did hurt—”

  What with hot soup and watered Chablis, Kitty and Cora were no longer intimidated by their surroundings.

  “Oh, Duchess, did you suffer?” Kitty asked pityingly.

  “Oh, I wasn’t even out yet. But some other girls felt awfully bad. Well, two of the ones who weren’t invited went to the ball even so—by pretending they were the sisters of a English lord! Someone got them tickets, using the English girls’ names.”

  “Highly reprehensible,” Miss Testvalley interposed, as the Glenloes gasped.

  “The New York papers,” the Duchess continued, “said how beautiful and elegant and lively and what wonderful dancers English girls were, compared with Americans.—But that’s not all,” she went on, over the sisters’ squeals of laughter. “Can you imagine, the papers here copied the New York articles—giving the names of the real English girls!—who’d never left home, of course, and were totally, absolutely dumbfounded! In fact, they still are, I happen to know.... No, I can’t tell you their names. As Miss Testvalley says, it was an unforgiveable masquerade.”

  Dover sole had followed soup. Miss Testvalley carried on the Duchess’s chatter—neither her present pupils nor her former one had ever seen her so animated; so keyed up, even—with anecdotes that lasted through veal, beef, partridge, salad, syllabub, cheese, fruit, and a savoury, to which the two youngest diners, though the others flagged, did full justice.

  “Once upon a time,” she said, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a menagerie. It was supposedly in his back garden, which is a good size, but the animals actually had the freedom of the house—and sometimes of the neighbours’ gardens, I’m afraid. He had ... Let me think. He had peacocks ... he had gazelles and armadillos and kangaroos, a raccoon—the raccoon ate one of his manuscripts. He had a wombat ... I believe a sloth ... but what he really wanted was an elephant....”

  “Oh, why?”

  “He wanted the elephant to clean the windows.”

  From behind Miss Testvalley came a deeper sound than the trills of laughter at the table. One of the statues lined against the wall stood tensed, his eyes squeezed shut and his cheeks puffed out, as though he were trying to control a fit of hiccups. Glancing over at him, the Glenloes saw that the Duchess also looked, but quickly averted her eyes.

  “Cora, we are in London, and tomorrow we’ll be in Norfolk,” Kitty told her sister, as they snuggled in bed, “and the day after we’ll be in the wedding.”

  They had been escorted to separate rooms, but as soon as their maid departed Kitty had run out of hers and jumped into bed with Cora.

  “I can’t sleep, can you?”

  “Oh, no ... Did you notice how the Duchess pretended not to hear that man laugh, so he wouldn’t be punished?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kitty said reverently, “the Duchess is my ideal!”

  “Then I suppose she can’t be mine too, so I don’t know who my ideal is—Yes, I do. The Princess of Wales. Ah ... lex ... ahn ... dra ... Such a beautiful name ...”

  “Ummm.”

  “Are you awake? I can’t sleep either....”

  Miss Testvalley, peeking in, heard, unsurprised, the breathing of two sleepers, and made her way, with guidance by servants, to the Duchess’s narrow, high-ceilinged boudoir and on through a tapestried bedroom to a pretty octagonal room walled with mirrors. There sat Annabel, in a dressing-gown that was far from pretty, having her thick brown-gold curls brushed into ruliness by a prim-visaged woman whom the governess knew to be her maid.

  “Come in,” Nan cried. “Thank you, Mabbit, good night.—Oh, Val, what fun, thanks to you! And tomorrow, after all these years, I’ll meet Mr. Rossetti! I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s possible too that we may meet ... That is, Sir Helmsley Thwarte may come with us. He wants to see that replica of his Madonna and show Dante Gabriel a copy he’s made, and he may be in town on business.... Annabel, I must explain that Dante Gabriel is vague about money. His problems—” Miss Testvalley paused, eyeing Annabel’s innocently receptive face. Why tell her that Dante Gabriel was addicted to chloral mixed with whisky? “He is ill, you see, and he sometimes asks for, for ... financial help. I hope and pray he won’t importune you—or Sir Helmsley.” She was afraid that Nan would wonder at her jerky babbling, but Nan only asked:

  “Do you think that Mr. Guy Thwarte will come too?”

  Next morning, an important person in black bombazine with a tall footman and a chubby buttons in her wake identified herself as the Bingham Nanny and supervised the transfer of the Glenloe party into the Bingham carriage. Shortly afterward, Sir Helmsley Thwarte, unaccompanied by his son, arrived at Folyat House in a hansom-cab into which, vigorously, and limping only slightly, he helped the two ladies, telling the driver: “Chelsea. Tudor House, Cheyne Walk.—It is, in fact, Tudor,” he observed to Nan as they bowled along. “You like historical associations, Duchess; did you know that Henry the Eighth’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, lived there after his death?—Am I not right, Miss Testvalley?” Stroking his fine auburn beard, the baronet turned deferentially to the governess, but she had her head at the window, watching for what proved to be a bow-fronted ivy-grown brick house separated from the walk and the river-bank by a little neglected-looki
ng garden.

  Rossetti, seated by an ornate fireplace, apologized with an expansive and courtly gesture for not rising, and murmured: “Laura, cara! ... Enchanté, Duchess! ... Sir Helmsley!” He looked far more ill than when Sir Helmsley had seen him last. His pallor was accentuated by the black circles around his deep-set, dark, liquid eyes, but the eyes had all their old magnetism.

  After careful scrutiny, pulling at the long drooping moustache that made him resemble at first glance a Chinese mandarin rather than an Anglo-Italian painter-poet, he pronounced Sir Helmsley’s water-colour exquisite. “I wonder if it wasn’t I who copied you, Sir Helmsley!”

  “But why,” the baronet asked him, “have you not painted Miss Testvalley?”

  “Ah, but only Goya could do justice to those incandescent eyes!” Rossetti answered.

  “Precisely the painter I have always thought of for her!” Sir Helmsley accepted the statement as an accolade; he could have had no more gratifying confirmation of his artist’s sensibility. “As Petrarch is the poet! ‘Costei, ch’è tra le donne un sole, In me, movendo de’ beglio ochi i rai, Cria d’amor penseri....’ ”

  Rossetti, raising his heavy brows, looked, blandly quizzical, from his old patron to Miss Testvalley; who blushed darkly and asked her cousin, in haste, “And for the Duchess?”

  “For that naive grace”—Rossetti was as prompt as magisterial in his reply—“those soft eyes, that eloquent play of expression—Romney! Without a doubt, Romney.”

  Leaving Miss Testvalley to chat with her cousin, Sir Helmsley and the Duchess walked about the high shadowy parlour, looking at Rossetti’s drawing of the austere profiles of his sister Christina and their mother and other works by him and and his Brethren, and investigated the ancient room that was now a studio, with its smell of turpentine, recalling to the baronet his own Paris atelier in les beaux jours d’autrefois and of—he sniffed uncertainly—some sort of exotic incense. After he returned to the others, the Duchess lingered, turning over canvasses here and there. She re-joined the older people with a look of puzzlement.

  When the three visitors had taken leave of the great Pre-Raphaelite, the Duchess strolled down the little garden path and crossed the walk to the edge of the Thames. Sir Helmsley gently detained Miss Testvalley. Tapping the re-wrapped water-colour he held pressed under his left arm, his voice urgent, he said: “My dear Laura, in offering you this trifle I beg you to accept the poor copier with it. You must know that I hope you will consent to be my wife.”

  Miss Testvalley’s lids fell over the eyes which only Goya could have painted, and she crimsoned almost painfully; but after a moment she looked her suitor straight in the face. “And you must know my regard for you, Sir Helmsley; but it is a very serious step—for each of us; and not to be taken on impulse.”

  “You have regard for me!—Then,” Sir Helmsley pressed, “then you do not say no?”

  “Oh, no,” Laura Testvalley replied, “I do not say no—”

  “Then you say yes!” Without more ado, his handsome worn face shining, Sir Helmsley seized her hand and kissed it lingeringly; and as he relinquished it said: “You have made me very happy.”

  Meanwhile Nan stood gazing at the Thames and across at the Battersea shore through a gauzy mist that shimmered green and gold in the pale late-winter sunlight. A string of barges glided by, outstripped by a rowing-boat.... The unresting, changeable river had frolicked past the bungalow at Runnymede some miles ago. Around the next bend, it would surge grandly, mightily, past the Houses of Parliament, where Ushant sat in the Lords and where Guy Thwarte would sit (for of course he would win the election) in the Commons.

  She heard Miss Testvalley call her name, and turned back.

  When Sir Helmsley had escorted them to Folyat House and gone on (to business, he said, with his solicitor), Annabel led the governess up into her boudoir, where, remembering, she cried: “Val, you won’t believe it! There were some canvasses standing on edge, and when I tipped them over to see, they were Sir Helmsley’s Madonna—at least ten Madonnas, all identical!”

  Miss Testvalley seemed abstracted, as if shaking herself free from some pleasant musing. “Thank heaven you’re the one who saw them! People want replicas, and Dante Gabriel ... for years he has been too busy or too ill to do them, and so he pays other painters, poor ones, or students, to rough out copies for him to finish. I had heard that sometimes all he contributes is his signature, but I didn’t know that he was running a factory!” Miss Testvalley cast her speaking eyes up to the puce-and-gold ceiling. “And what’s more, he asks for payment for paintings he may not begin for years. Thank heaven too that he didn’t ask Sir Helmsley—or you—for money!”

  Nan said eagerly: “But he’s not mercenary.... And when his wife died, isn’t it true that he buried his poems with her?”

  Miss Testvalley hesitated. “Yes ... he had his poems buried with poor Lizzy Siddal, but later he ... he lost his vein, he needed to publish, and he had her body exhumed.—No, no,” she said quickly as Nan’s mouth opened in horror, “that was human nature; he found he couldn’t bear to annihilate his work.... The thing is that he hadn’t the courage to retrieve the manuscripts himself, he made someone else do it for him.... Annabel,” Miss Testvalley said with some severity, “you are romantic by nature, which is excellent, but romanticism should include recognition of facts.”

  As Nan, at the other end of the sofa on which they had installed themselves, frowned thoughtfully, Miss Testvalley rose briskly, her face again subtly a-glow. “However, my dear, just now, like a sundial, I can think only of happy hours! You’re returning to Champions at once? I’ll see you there when I bring Corisande and Kitty back. Meanwhile, I’ll be with Miss March for a day or so.”

  Nan, too, stood up, smiling. “Yes. The carriage will be at the door whenever you say, Val dear.”

  “Thank you, Annabel!” Miss Testvalley was pleased out of all proportion to the service itself (though her arrival in a ducal barouche in view of all Curzon Street would provide Jacky March with an innocent thrill). During the last few days she had noted several indications that her favourite pupil was learning to make modest use of her prerogative as Duchess. And whatever happened—in her unwonted mood of joy, Miss Testvalley did not analyze a “whatever” that betrayed her underlying uneasiness as to Annabel’s situation—whatever happened, it could do Annabel nothing but good to learn to assert herself.

  “Afterward,” she continued, “I’ll go on to my family for a bit. But I think I shall not tell them about this latest performance of D.G.R.’s. Arrivederci, Annabel!”

  XXXII.

  When Annabel opened the library door, Lady Glenloe looked up from a large atlas open on the table before her and came, arms open and wind-burnt face beaming, to welcome her back to Champions as a third daughter.

  After demanding and receiving a report of the evening at Folyat House and the departure of the bridesmaids for Norfolk, she sat down with a nod of satisfaction and a sigh of frustration. “My dear, Ralph writes that he has been posted to ‘Noru.’ In India, I fancy, but I can’t find it on the map. Where in the world can it be?”

  “Noru, Nohru ... ?” Obligingly, Nan turned and began to search the big globe.

  “You say Sir Helmsley was there when you visited Miss Testvalley’s cousin?” Lady Glenloe, pleased with events, vouchsafed a confidence. “Of course, you’ve seen that I hope his son will marry one of my girls.”

  Bent over the globe, Nan put her hand to her heart as if she had been stabbed.

  “And I’m sure that Sir Helmsley hopes so too. You’ve noticed how he takes Miss Testvalley off to chat so that Guy can be alone with Corisande or Catharine? Tell me, have you noticed any signs of preference?—on Guy’s part, that is?” Lady Glenloe cocked a cheerful head expectantly.

  As the countries of the world rolled past in varnished yellows, pale greens, and pinks—as the small world that was herself was suddenly decentralized—Nan drew on a courage she hadn’t known was in her.

 
“No.” She turned to Lady Glenloe. “No. They are both dears.”

  “Is Your Grace ill?” Mabbit, who was arranging gloves in a drawer, looked up with a frown and a tone of repressed annoyance, as of one improperly interrupted in performance of a duty, when Nan took refuge in her room.

  “No,” Nan said, without looking at her. “You may go.”

  “Yes,” she moaned, throwing herself on her bed when Mabbit had left. “Yes, I am ill. I am in love. I never knew.... And what am I to do ... ? I didn’t know....”

  “You are pale,” Lady Glenloe said compunctiously, when Nan came down to dinner. “I ought not to have allowed you to go to London and back in such a short time, especially since the Dowager said you were run-down and needed change of air. Fortunately, I have a special decoction that may help.”

  So her mother-in-law had engineered the invitation to Champions. But it didn’t matter. Nan submitted to a dose of alakar (“which they use in the Caucasus; Piers says it accounts for their longevity, along with that curious curd yahoor”), grateful to be supplied with a plausible cover for heartache.

  Incurable heartache; for there was no remedy. Alone at last in her canopied bed, the fierce Nan St. George who had cried out that she would kill a beastly governess revived, like a free-spirited dryad breaking from long captivity in a granite boulder—to savage herself. How could she, who used to make believe she was Yseult and Guinevere and Nicolette and mooned over Rossetti’s “fleshly” verse, how could—First she’d imagined that she was in love when she wasn’t, letting the magic of Camelot enshroud the Duke’s dull lovelessness in Celtic mist. Then she had really fallen in love: and not known. She had delighted in the Correggios, even looked at them with Guy Thwarte, but stupidly had seen only their sunny joyousness, not their passion. She had let her love grow, nourished it, and not known.